Web Marketing HowTo

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WordPress is great right out of the metaphorical box, but there is a wide array of thousands WordPress Plugins out there that will help you leverage the platform and make the most out of it. Here’s a list of the 16 WordPress Plugins that you need to have to get your site ready for prime time and make the most out of it and the information it can feed you.

On to the list!

1. Akismet - Akismet helps protect you from comment spam. Very easy to use and extremely effective. You’ll need to get a free WordPress.com API key to use this.
2. WordPress.com Stats - Since you’ll be getting a WordPress.com API key anyway, go ahead and download this plugin that gives you basic but useful stats in a nicely formatted and easy to read style.
3. All in One SEO Pack - Gives you quick and easy SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for your WordPress blog. Re-writes your page titles first, adds in meta keywords and descriptions, allows you to eliminate apparent duplicate content simply and easily.
4. Contact Form ][ -This is a drop-in form that you can use so site visitors can send you messages, as opposed to restricting them to comments on your posts.
5. Executable PHP widget - Sooner or later, you’re going to decide you need to have PHP snippets in your sidebar, and this modification of the standard WordPress text widget will allow just that.
6. FeedBurner FeedSmith - This plugin redirects all your feeds to your FeedBurner Feed so you can track them.
7. FeedBurner StandardStats - Helps you integrate FeedBurner’s StandardStats into your site.
8. Google Analyticator - Enables Google Analytics to log visitors and other critical information. This information is more detailed than some other stats but somewhat unwieldy for daily “how are things?” checking.
9. Google XML Sitemaps - Generates XML sitemaps usable by Google, Yahoo, and other search engines. This is critical to helping drive search engine traffic to your blog.
10. Popularity Contest - Allows you to rank posts by popularity using a configurable score based on type of view.
11. Show Top Commentators - This plugin encourages reader comments by displaying the most active commentators and their linked websites, if given.
12. Simple Tags - All sorts of great options for tagging your posts, managing tags, Related Posts, and more!
13. Subscribe To Comments - Notifies commentators of replies as they are posted so they can continue the discussion.
14. WordPress Database Backup - Backup your database on-demand or via basic scheduling.
15. WordPress Reports - Provides good at a glance stats from Google Analytics and FeedBurner data.
16. WP Super Cache - Enable caching for your blog to help you over the Diggs, Stumbles, and Slashdottings.

These are a list of the basic plugins you’ll need. You’ll notice that several revolve around WordPress.com, Google, and FeedBurner. These sites have a lot to offer and future posts will detail the things you’ll use them for.

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